We performed a comparison between ESET Endpoint Security and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: ESET Endpoint Security ultimately won out in this comparison. Our reviewers agree that ESET Endpoint Security is easy to install and easy to use. In addition, it has excellent customer support.
"The main thing is that I feel safe. Because the processes that have been used to get a handle on the attackers are much better than other competitors"
"It is a scalable solution...The initial setup of Fortinet FortiEDR was straightforward."
"Fortinet FortiEDR's firewalling, rule creation, monitoring, and inspection profiles are great."
"Fortinet FortiEDR's scalability is quite good, and you can add licenses to the solution."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the ability to customize it and to reduce its size. It lets you run in a very small window in terms of memory and resources on legacy cash registers."
"It notifies us if there's any suspicious file on any PC. If any execution or similar kind of thing is happening, it just alerts us. It doesn't only alert. It also blocks the execution until we allow it. We check whether the execution is legitimate or not, and then approve it or keep it blocked. This gives us a little bit of control over this mechanism. Fortinet FortiEDR is also very straightforward and easy to maintain."
"The solution was relatively easy to deploy."
"The ease of deployment and configuration is valuable. It's very easy compared to other vendors like Sophos. Sophos' configuration is complex. Fortinet is a lot easier to understand. You don't need a lot of admin knowledge to do the configuration."
"Installing and integrating ESET Endpoint Antivirus was easy. It prevents worms, malware, and Trojans."
"ESET provides good protection."
"I feel the solution to be beneficial in respect of features that I cannot find with SSTM's."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"The most valuable features of this solution are, of course, the IPS/IDS, Intrusion Prevention, Intrusion Detection, and Antivirus."
"What is great about ESET is the ERA Web Console through which we can pull various reports, monitor and administer all clients and servers, and the console is easy to use."
"We use ESET, which is pretty much perfect for us. It is also absolutely simple and automatic once setup."
"We have not picked up a bug yet, because we use ESET, which is a tried and proven system."
"File protection is the most valuable feature. Antivirus security on the Level OS, Microsoft Defender, and Microsoft Guard for 2019."
"We had certain compliance and usage issues. For example, our company wanted to go with CIS, but we didn't have a proper way of measuring whether the endpoints have the right standards in place or whether they were compliant with CIS. Microsoft Defender was like a one-stop for most things because it gave us the vulnerability and patching scores so that our vulnerability management teams can focus on covering up the vulnerabilities and the patching team can check the vulnerable versions and deploy the right versions."
"There are a couple of features, such as isolating the devices or connecting the device and connecting live response."
"It's a very complete application. I have all the controls in one site. I can track emails, attacks, and threats, and I can research information. I really like this configuration because I have all the information in place."
"It's great for investigating what's happening on a machine. They show a whole bunch of machine timeline events that are related to a security incident. They have quite good details on the things related to threat and vulnerability management, such as any weakness that has been disclosed publicly, assets that are exposed, and if there is an exploit active in the wild for that vulnerability. It can provide you with all such information, which is cool."
"One feature I like the most is vulnerability management, which shows any vulnerable software or OS present in my environment. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint provides a complete overview and also recommends the steps to mitigate the vulnerabilities or threats. Most of the other antivirus or EDR solutions generally don't provide vulnerability management. It is an add-on that Microsoft Defender for Endpoint provides."
"We found that because the endpoint devices are based on Microsoft Windows devices and Windows Defender is integrated with the foundation and the core layer, it makes it more integrated and more agile in terms of responding to any security threats or changes or development"
"We have liked the fact that it comes with Microsoft Windows 10 and it is constantly updated with all new virus definitions. It is also updated with new security features on a regular basis."
"Integration with Azure and SaaS provisioning tools could improve Fortinet FortiEDR."
"The solution's installation from a central installation server could be improved because the engineers had a little bit of trouble getting it installed from a central location."
"They can include the automation for the realtime updates. We have a network infrastructure with remote sites. Whenever they send updates, they are not automated. We have to go into the console and push those updates. I wish it was more automated. The update file is currently around 31 MB. It could be smaller."
"The EDR console should have more extensive reporting. You shouldn't need to purchase FortiAnalyzer. It should be included in the EDR part. The security adviser cloud platform could be improved with more options for exclusive or intensive rules for devices."
"It takes about two business days for initial support, which is too slow in urgent situations."
"Everything with Fortinet having to do with their cloud services. They need to invest more in their internal infrastructure that they are running in the cloud. One of the things I find with their cloud environment compared to others' is that they go cheap on the equipment. So it causes some performance degradation."
"The support needs improvement."
"The solution is not stable."
"When users renew licenses, they should offer a discount."
"ESET Endpoint Security could improve EDR integration."
"ESET Endpoint Antivirus can improve by having better EDR intelligence and automation. The EDR still needs lots of human interpretation. It can be better if add more intelligence to the EDR part of the endpoint protection."
"I am a MAC user and my asset cybersecurity is continuously displaying warnings that I am not using their firewall."
"They should have better support for different languages and auto-upgrading."
"The tool needs to explore security possibilities to secure iOS and Mac devices."
"Sometimes, ESET sends alerts within my own network that cause confusion. That is, it might warn about contamination, or that the VM has crashed, but it doesn't go further than that. It just shows me the alert and sometimes I am not sure what to do about it."
"It would be useful if they could automate the deployment more."
"The automation could be simpler on the mitigation side. It has a learning curve. Otherwise, it's pretty easy."
"In active mode, it's great that it gives you so much information, but it does record every keystroke so you have a lot of logs... that amount of data logging started to add up in the cost."
"It is using a large space in your memory all the time. While an antivirus will use some of your memory, if they could reduce the load of the antivirus to some extent that would be good."
"I think Microsoft needs to improve some of the security aspects of Defender. The email part, in particular, needs to be improved in terms of security effectiveness."
"The product should reduce updates since it is hard to keep up."
"There's a lot of manual effort involved to configure what we need."
"The scalability could be improved - I would rate it between a seven and an eight."
"It is not very scalable from the eyes of an MSP because there is no dashboard that you can use to see all of your devices that have Windows Defender unless you have your own dashboard or an RMM tool to actually look at it. So, you might not get to know that a particular computer of a client is doing something, and it might have got a virus. That person might know that, but unless you set it up to actually send you the information, you won't get to know that. That's one of the things that is hard with Microsoft Defender. It is not made for the MSP world where you have one pane of glass to see all of your clients with Microsoft Defender on it unless your RMM tool already has that built-in and it can see the telemetry from Microsoft Defender."
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ESET Endpoint Protection Platform is ranked 9th in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 96 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is ranked 1st in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 182 reviews. ESET Endpoint Protection Platform is rated 8.2, while Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of ESET Endpoint Protection Platform writes "Easy to set up with good security and rapidly improving capabilities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint writes "Eliminates the need to look at multiple dashboards by automatically providing one XDR dashboard to show the security score of each subscription". ESET Endpoint Protection Platform is most compared with Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business, CrowdStrike Falcon, SentinelOne Singularity Complete, Check Point Harmony Endpoint and Fortinet FortiClient, whereas Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is most compared with Symantec Endpoint Security, Intercept X Endpoint, CrowdStrike Falcon, SentinelOne Singularity Complete and Fortinet FortiClient. See our ESET Endpoint Protection Platform vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint report.
See our list of best Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) vendors, best Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) vendors, and best Anti-Malware Tools vendors.
We monitor all Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.